Nine schools have begun taking payments from their students for lunch by using facial recognition software to identify each student automatically
Schools in North Ayrshire have said that the facial recognition system will speed up queues, but both parents and campaigners have complained that students aren’t being adequately informed of the privacy risks.
The schools in North Ayrshire claim that the system will speed up queues and reduce the risks of COVID-19 in using card payments or fingerprint scanners is being launched in schools today.
But some parents and campaigners are warning that it normalises exposing children forms of biometric surveillance, and have complained that they weren’t confident the children were adequately informed about the potential privacy risks.
This comes after Andrew Bailey, the governor of Bank of England, said he continued to believe the recent jump in inflation would be temporary. The Bank of England governor has warned that it will “have to act” to curb the rising inflation in the UK, sending a new signal that it is gearing up to raise interest rates.
“It’s the fastest way of recognising someone at the till,” David Swanston, the managing director of CRB Cunninghams – the company that provided the system – told the Financial Times newspaper.
“In a secondary school you have about a 25-minute period to serve potentially 1,000 pupils. So we need fast throughput at the point of sale,” he added, telling the newspaper the average transaction time using the system was five seconds per pupil.
According to North Ayrshire council, 97% of the school children or their parents have consented to the use of facial recognition within the area’s schools.
The Department for Education says that it does not monitor the use of the technology within schools.
Similar uses within schools in America have led to states such as New York temporarily banning the use of facial recognition technology.
Fraser Sampson, who is the Biometrics Commissioner for England and Wales, and whose predecessors have complained that the use of facial recognition technology is not covered under the same laws that DNA and fingerprints are, has said that if there is a less intrusive way for school children to pay for their lunches, then it should be used.
The use of live facial recognition systems for police use stretches back to the year 2015, when Leicestershire Police first trialled a system in the queues to enter Download Festival, located at Donnington Park.
Non-live versions used for mugshot matching, as well as for authenticating people to log-in to their mobile phones introduce less privacy concerns as there is more control over whose face gets matched.
Campaigners are concerned that the use of this technology exposes people in crowds to potential arrests without any reasonable cause.
This comes after The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has said that job vacancies within the UK hit 1.1 million between the months of July and September, the highest level since records had began back in 2001.
Despite the outcry following this event, that the technology was not regulated on an equal footing to other biometric technologies, such as fingerprints and DNA, despite potentially being even more invasive, no legislation has been introduced yet, putting it on an equal statutory footing.
Today, the system is used in a range of environments where there is a desire to identify individuals within a crowd, from E-Gates at airports to Notting Hill Carnival.
An independent study that was commissioned by the Metropolitan Police found that the use of such systems is 81% inaccurate.
Silkie Carlo, the head of Big Brother Watch, said: “It’s normalising biometric identity check for something that is mundane. You don’t need to resort to airport-style [technology] for children getting their lunch.”
